Ensuring Network Integrity, Continuity and Process Enforcement with Route Analytics
Layer 3 Visibility for Mission-Critical Network Services
By Packet Design
Published 2008, Posted June 2008

Abstract:

For government, public service, national security and military agencies, maintaining network continuity is no casual matter. The sensitivity of these organizations’ missions means that there is no room for network outages, application degradation, or network integrity breaches. The good news is that these agencies have built highly redundant IP networks to ensure application traffic delivery. The bad news: these massive and complex networks lack layer 3 network management visibility. This makes it much harder to ensure network integrity and continuity in the face of failures, threats, hostile incidents, and even the less sinister but more common culprits of human error, unenforced operational procedures and time-consuming network troubleshooting procedures.

Route analytics technology, with its real-time, network-wide understanding of the operational routing topology and the traffic flowing across all network paths and links, provides the missing visibility. With route analytics, network engineers can easily monitor for network topology and traffic problems, strengthen change management processes, proactively uncover network vulnerabilities, and accurately simulate failure scenarios and resulting network behavior. Effective use of route analytics as part of the network management process can help ensure the network will always be ready to pass the test for mission-critical requirements.